September 6, 2015

Jack Kelly Sunday

The Post-Gazette's Jack Kelly's still misleading (read: lying to) his readers. Sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes it's blatant. And sometimes it takes some digging to find out the depth of his dishonesty.

I'll leave it to you, o gentle reader, to decide which one it is today.

Jack begins with a brief discussion of Republicans, RINOs, and why Congressional leaders McConnell and Boehner are actually "Whigs."

(So would you like to swing on a starCarry moonbeams home in a jarAnd be better off than you areOr would you rather be a Whig?

A Whig's a politico who lived long agoReplaced by Republicans, you know...)

[It's from a song - google it and get a little culture]

The Whigs made up one of the two dominant political parties pre-Civil war and the party dissolved over slavery. Its anti-slave Whigs in the north (the "Conscience" Whigs) being absorbed by the new Republican Party and the pro-slavery Whigs (the "Cotton" Whigs) moving south to the older States-Rights flavored Democrats.

And here's where Jack makes his first big mistake/lie. An earlier error is his description of "Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Fremont and Victory" as the platform of the Republican party in 1856 - actually, it was only its slogan. The actual platform can be found here.

The party of slavery and segregation has done nothing to prevent, and much to facilitate, the murder of thousands of Americans by violent felons among illegal immigrants. Passage of “Kate Steinle’s Law” to cut off federal funds for so-called “sanctuary cities” and to make the Democrats who run them liable for wrongful death suits, is one of two great moral imperatives for 2015.

This is a two-fer. Look at the first sentence. By the "party of slavery and segregation" Jack Kelly means the Democratic party. As Steven Benen of Washington Monthly noted five years ago:

This comes up from time to time, whenever Republicans are feeling particularly defensive about the civil rights issues. But in light of the party's confusion, it's probably time for a quick refresher.

The Democratic Party, in the first half of the 20th century, was home to competing constituencies -- southern whites with abhorrent views on race, and white progressives and African Americans in the north, who sought to advance the cause of civil rights. The party struggled, ultimately siding with an inclusive, liberal agenda.

As the party shifted, the Democratic mainstream embraced its new role. Republicans, meanwhile, also changed. In the wake of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, the Republican Party welcomed the white supremacists who no longer felt comfortable in the Democratic Party. Indeed, in 1964, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater boasted of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and made it part of his platform. It was right around this time when figures like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond made the transition -- leaving the Democratic Party for the GOP.

Indeed, look at the political platform of those "Dixicrats" in 1948 (those would be those "southern whites with abhorrent views on race" that eventually went to the GOP in the mid-60s). It actually contained this:

We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.

So tell me again how the Democrats are the "party of slavery and segregation"?

Indeed, the academic literature on this question is pretty clear: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born citizens, and there is no credible evidence that they have any effect on overall crime rates.

Other studies look at crime rates in cities and states that have different immigrant populations, finding that increases in the immigrant population coincide with big decreases in violent crime rates. Nevertheless, the myth of the immigrant-driven crime wave remains prevalent.

Why doesn't anyone at the P-G do this before publication? How much more do we need to do?

Ok, one more, I guess. The big one:

The other is to end federal subsidies for Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills. The nine gruesome, heartbreaking videos released so far by the Center for Medical Progress make plain the wine-swilling Mengeles who run the organization have committed multiple felonies.

As the man said, you're entitled to your own opinions but you're not entitled to your own facts. From Thinkprogress:

Following the release of several inflammatory videos that suggest Planned Parenthood is improperly profiting from the sale of “aborted baby parts,” GOP lawmakers have been quick to condemn the national women’s health organization. However, their current strategies to attack Planned Parenthood are falling short.

Planned Parenthood officials say they’re simply helping their patients donate fetal tissue samples, which can help scientists develop new treatments for serious diseases. Anti-abortion activists, meanwhile, say the misleading videos released by the right-wing group Center for Medical Progress prove the organization is acting immorally.

In response, several state officials have launched investigations into their local Planned Parenthood affiliates, looking for proof that the group is breaking the law.

But so far, they’ve come up completely empty.

Officials in states including Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, and South Dakota have not been able to turn up any evidence that Planned Parenthood clinics are violating state laws and regulations regarding the collection of fetal tissue donations. Records obtained from other states, like Kansas, reveal that some Planned Parenthood clinics don’t even give their patients the option to donate this tissue.

“In every state where these investigations have concluded, officials have cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing,” Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of Planned Parenthood, said in a statement released on Friday. “We’ve said all along that Planned Parenthood follows all laws and has very high medical standards, and that’s what every one of these investigations has found. This campaign by anti-abortion extremists is nothing less than a fraud.”

You're free, of course, to be skeptical of ThinkProgress, but take a look at their sources.

So, Jack. Where are the felonies? Where/when did they occur? What's your evidence that they did? How do you reconcile that to the actual facts produced above?

And most importantly:

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE AT THE P-G GET ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS BEFORE THE PUBLICATION OF JACK'S LATEST FETID STAIN OF RIGHT WING FECULENCE??

6 comments:

And now a producer for the MSDNC Rachel Maddow show is progressive DNC hack who would claim Bull Conner and Woodrow Wilson were conservative Republicans.

A bigger hack than Jack Kelly.

"Indeed, the academic literature on this question is pretty clear: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born citizens, and there is no credible evidence that they have any effect on overall crime rates. "

For some odd reason, I can not find these stats broken down by illegal and legal and by race.

As for social science studies.http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-adjective-modifies-noun.htmlNow, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

Here are your debunking talking points Dayvoehttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/science/many-social-science-findings-not-as-strong-as-claimed-study-says.html?_r=1“There’s no doubt replication is important, but it’s often just an attack, a vigilante exercise,”

"The 2010 Census data reveals that incarceration rates among the young, less-educated Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men who make up the bulk of the unauthorized population are significantly lower than the incarceration rate among native-born young men without a high-school diploma. In 2010, less-educated native-born men age 18-39 had an incarceration rate of 10.7 percent—more than triple the 2.8 percent rate among foreign-born Mexican men, and five times greater than the 1.7 percent rate among foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men."

"As for social science studies ..."

Thank you for that salutory caution. Given your high standards of integrity, you are planning to produce well-validated and substantial evidence that contradicts the AIC report and supports Jack Kelly's claims about illegal immigrants, right? I can't wait to see it. And of course, even though you pulled the link to the NYTimes article from Vox Days's blog, you don't subscribe to any of the blanket right-wing anti-science non sequiturs bubbling out of that hopeless dope's brain. That's why you didn't correct Dave's last point about Kelly's attacks on Planned Parenthood. You see the facts are clearly in Dave's favor. Isn't it great to meet on the common ground of reality?

"native-born young men without a high-school diploma".Look like they are manipulating the incarceration datasets into smaller and smaller subsets to achieve the conclusions that fits their narrative.

How abouthttp://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/07/illegal_aliens_murder_at_a_much_higher_rate_than_us_citizens_do.html“The number of criminal aliens in federal prisons in fiscal year 2010 was about 55,000, and the number of SCAAP criminal alien incarcerations in state prison systems and local jails was about 296,000 in fiscal year 2009 (the most recent data available), and the majority were from Mexico.”

Where are the felonies? Where/when did they occur? What's your evidence that they did?

Same place Ed Rendell and his cronies put the Kermit Gosnell evidence during his administration.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_GosnellAt least 6 more videos coming from Center for Medical Progress

OK, let's dig into the details some more. We'll both learn. The reason the authors of the AIC report focus on young, uneducated males is that they make up the bulk of the population of illegal immigrants, as they state. Compared to US citizens of the same demographic, they are incarcerated at a far lower rate, at least that's the claim of the report.

I took a look at the GAO report cited by the American Stinker article you linked to (sorry, but the site is full of wingnut articles. I'm suspending judgment on this one for the sake of argument.) Based on the statistics cited in the GAO report for 2009 (the last year of data in the report), the total prison population of illegal immigrants made up about 3% of the estimated total population of illegal immigrants in the US. That's a pretty high percentage, much higher than the incarceration rate for the US population generally, and we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world! The report also warns that it is working with incomplete data, so the actual numbers of incarcerated illegal immigrants could have been much higher. On the other hand, the bulk of the crimes committed by these individuals were violations of immigration laws, drug offenses and traffic violations. The rates of violent crimes were much lower than for US citizens.

If the GAO report and the AIC report are both correct about their factual claims, it would appear that large numbers of incarcerated illegal immigrants were either females, college-educated, or older men. I suppose that's possible, but it's more likely we have a discrepancy between the figures cited in the GAO report and the data used by the authors of tha AIC report, a discrepancy that those authors either didn't notice or chose to ignore. Not impressed. Thanks for bringing this up.

As for the Center for Medical Progress, they have already been thoroughly exposed as lying hacks. If you haven't figured that out yet, you need to turn on that crap detector.

You're right, missed that. Even if you throw in high school graduates, I don't see how the AIC and GAO numbers line up. For the AIC percentages of young, uneducated male illegal immigrant criminals to be consistent w/ the GAO figures, a large percentage of the illegal immigrant incarcerated population would have to be females, high-school or collge graduates, or older men. I'm leaving young kids out of reckoning here. Another way to reconcile these numbers would be to suppose that the total illegal immigrant population at any one time is the wrong number to compare to the number of illegal immigrant criminals. Instead, we would presume a large volume of churn (new immigrants coming in, other immigrants being deported) in the total immigrant population and perhaps a more stable population of the incarcerated. The GAO report implies that that some thousands of the criminals reported have been incarcerated for long periods of time. I have no idea how much this would help reconcile the numbers.